Given the history of the Terminator franchise, the idea of a happy ending can feel like an awkward joke, just waiting for yet another time travel jaunt from a robot-controlled dystopian future to overwrite any smiles with the threat of the end of humanity. But, it turns out, 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day almost ended with a scene that showed that sometimes good things can happen to good people — or, at least, people who helped destroy a genocidal shape-changing robot.

Judgment Day, it turns out, had an epilogue set three decades after the main events in the movie, in which an aged Linda Hamilton explains in voiceover that the promised robot apocalypse in 1997 never happened after all. (Rolling Stoneposted the video this week.)

"There was no judgment day," Hamilton's Sarah Connor says in the scene, narrating into a 2027 dictaphone. "People went to work, as they always do, laughed, complained, watched TV, made love. I wanted to run through the street yelling, 'Every day from this day on is a gift. Use it well.' Instead, I got drunk."

She goes on to say that "the dark future that never came still exists for me, and it always will, like the traces of a dream." John Connor, it's revealed, grew up to become a U.S. Senator, with a daughter of his own. It's a different fate for the characters than the one revealed in 2003's Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which also went with the idea that the 1997 prediction proved to be wrong, only to show it happening in 2004 instead.

Watch the video below. Alan Taylor's Terminator Genisys, rebooting the franchise, is released July 1.